Monday, August 15, 2005

Support for Cindy Sheehan

Many people are heading down to Texas to support Cindy, including other family members of soldiers serving or killed in Iraq.

TomPaine.com has an article originally printed in The Philadelphia Inquirer written by the mother and brother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker, killed while searching for WMDs in 2004.

We sit together in the searing sun, on a tiny strip of roadside, two miles from the comforts of the president's ranch. We've camped in thunderstorms and been attacked by fire ants.

We have now in Crawford an invaluable collection of ordinary Americans who can speak a plain and irrefutable truth about the reality of the Iraq war. If the president, and the rest of America, had the patience for these stories, we might find the capacity to stop this unending tragedy.

We're here with moms like Sherry Glover. She came in from Houston with her daughter, Katie, and her 3-month-old granddaughter, Dakota. Katie enlisted in the Army. Stationed in Korea, she met her husband. He's in Iraq now. Katie is on Individual Ready Reserve, and it is within the realm of possibility that she, too, could be activated when her maternity leave is over.

Soldiers visit the Glover house regularly. When they come, Katie peeks fearfully out of the window to study their clothes. She knows a class A Army uniform could be the messenger there to say, "We regret to inform you... " She sighs with relief when she realizes that they are merely recruiters who have come, yet again, to talk to Sherry's 19-year-old twin sons.

Something about recruits constantly bothering that family just feels so wrong.